I’ve been blogging here for half a decade. Yikes.
And having just finished re-reading my 2011 write-up post, things today are not all that different from last year (which mostly sucks). DF2.0 is still not out or even close (no beta), Dominion is dead, GW2 is about to release, EVE is EVE, and the rest of the genre is still more or less in the toilet. At least Tortanic has been more entertaining than I expected blog-wise, good stuff there. I really, really hope the 2013 edition of this post is not me repeating the above.
To the numbers!
Blog Stats as of 8/13/2012
Total views: 1,420,684
Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 1,474
Comments: 21,858
Blog Stats as of 8/12/2011
Total views: 1,035,401
Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 1,166
Comments: 16,129
Blog Stats 2010
Total views: 692,972
Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 843
Comments: 11,790
Blog Stats 2009
Total views: 335,842
Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 523
Comments: 5,393
Blog Stats 2008
Total views: 104,123
Busiest day: 11,852 – Thursday, September 6, 2007
Posts: 253
Comments: 1,658
I think at this point I need to pay off a major website to link to some post to knock off that Sep 6th, 2007 post. It’s getting kinda silly. Comments increased nicely, thanks to everyone who took the time. I made a total of 308 posts, which while not a record seems like a huge amount to me right now, especially in a year when the general MMO trend was “Game X is coming ‘soon’” and soon never happened.
Top Posts for all days ending 2012-08-13
Rift Review (EG Style) – 54,525
The love and hate game, WoW style. – 18,228
The real Rift review – 18,100
EQ2, trial of the neverending download. – 12,542
Kingdom Conquest tips – 12,367
Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk battleship. – 11,373
iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday. – 10,792
Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. – 9,442
DarkFall Review: One Year Later – 7,863
Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finishes it. – 7,709
Top Posts for all days ending 2011-08-12
Rift Review (EG Style) 53,619
The love and hate game, WoW style. 17,966
The real Rift review 12,737
EQ2, trial of the neverending download. 11,812
iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday. 10,749
Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk battleship. 9,641
Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. 8,809
Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finishes it. 7,572
DarkFall Review: One Year Later 6,581
Warhammer’s major problem, the players. 6,191
The top spots remain unchanged, and with only some minor bump-ups in numbers. The big gainer was the real Rift review, which at least is a ‘real’ post. The top ten here is seriously looking like “slow blog day, better type something random/dumb/pointless” all-star list. The gift that is Google everyone. Also something should be said about that Kingdom Conquest post and how iPhone gaming is a big deal and really important now and blablabla.
WordPress, as they seem to always do, changed how they display stats and have made it no longer possible to copy/paste Referrers over, so this section is going to look a little different.
They also group things like search engines now. Thanks… Out of the 60k+ referrers from the Search Engine category, 55k was from Google. To state the obvious, Google is the only search engine in town that matters. Bing is a pathetic 1628, and it’s second.
Jestertrek takes the next spot with 11,612, followed by Google Reader (6491), WordPress.com (3806), Nilsmmoblog (1923), evenews24 (1820), TAGN (1817), Reddit (1744), Keen and Graev (1545), and finally Werit (1237) .
I question WordPress here, not only because the overall numbers look fishy, but because Kill Ten Rats is not even in the top 20. Sad, as I always liked seeing who brings people here, and found how that whole aspect of blogging works interesting.
Search Terms for all days ending 2012-08-13
rift review 50,531
hardcore casual 12,655
syncaine 9,453
darkfall review 6,005
rift reviews 5,495
elo hell 3,242
field runners 3,149
kingdom conquest 2,948
dragon age review 2,778
darkfall reviews 1,707
umadbro 1,707
Search Terms for all days ending 2011-08-12
rift review – 47,448
hardcore casual – 10,242
syncaine – 5,560
darkfall review – 5,503
rift reviews – 5,279
field runners – 3,149
elo hell – 2,791
dragon age review – 2,764
kingdom conquest – 1,865
darkfall reviews – 1,604
perpetuum review – 1,386
First the obvious, how funny is it that “darkfall reviews” and “umadbro” are tied for 10th at exactly 1707? Other than that, again just more of the same. The list is largely unchanged, and the numbers overall have gone up just a bit. The lesson here is that once your site is associated with a particular search term, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
So what to expect for year 5? I’m guessing GW2 will (continue) to cause waves, and hopefully we are not writing “what went wrong” posts in three months. Because if GW2 does indeed fail to truly entertain on an MMO scale (6+ months at the absolute minimum), 2013 is going to be a lot more of the same (EVE).
Speaking of EVE, I’ll be interested to see where INQ-E goes. We are in a bit of a summer lull right now, and still trying to figure out exactly what we want out of HAHA and deep WH space. I expect that once summer is over, alliance-wide activity will ramp back up, and with it INQ-E’s role. The winter expansion will likely play a pretty key role here as well.
Aria and I still play LoL almost daily. Playing the game is easy when your wife fiends for it, and it’s hard to say “no honey, I don’t want to play that computer game with you” with a straight face. That said, I will be forcing her to play GW2 with the rest of INQ, and have (jokingly but not really but yea) threatened to have her LoL account temp-banned to make that happen. The things we do for our loved ones, right?
Long-shots: DF2.0 comes out. Pathfinder comes out and is not a technical mess like 90% of all indy MMOs. Some random MMO comes out of left field and surprises us. Tortanic is a massive hit as a F2P title (haha just kidding, 0.0 chance of that happening).
5 years. I feel so old…
(Sorry for some of the formatting and lack of links. WordPress + Word + Copy/paste does not always yield great results)
Hardcore Casual 
“WordPress + Word + Copy/paste does not always yield great results”
You know, there is a special “paste from Word” option in the edit window tool bar. The button that looks like the Word icon.
Congrats on five years!
Yea because that button never takes something that looks normal in Word and creates a horrible page monster randomly…
Hrmm… I use it every month to do my month in review. Of course, that post looks like a horrible page monster to start with, so maybe I never noticed.
The site ate my other post because kismet hates my other link. /sigh
Anyway you directed 450+ hits (9th place) to us in the last month, so that we’re not even in the top 20 doesn’t make sense with the amount you comment and the amount we link your blog in our posts. I can’t tell from Google Analytics how outside links are clicked. I doubt Ethic has it set up to track that.
Also definitely congrats on having True Staying Power. You are one of the few MMO bloggers that I read every post.
Grats on 5 years. It’s always interesting to see detailed stats on blogs I follow, both for their own sake and to see where I am at. My first year is going to give me about a third of your first year I reckon, which is about 100 times better than I was expecting :P
What is it with Nils MMO Blog? I get referrals from it day in, day out yet the last time he posted was March 16th! Do people just use it as a surrogate blog reader?
And the genre is not “more or less in the toilet”. It’s just developing into something that’s not to your taste, which is an entirely different thing.
“Do people just use it as a surrogate blog reader?” One here that does. As more of a reader/lurker than a blogger it seems pretty extensive so despite trying to make my own blogroll, i always end up using Nils’ blog as one of my homepages even though its getting out of date for new blogs.
gratz on the 5 years too, always been one worth reading especially the recent tortantic entertainment, the gift that keeps on giving..
Gratz on five years! Bloody hell I was all was all warm and fuzzy with 100 page views after nearly two years and then I see this. Sigh. Maybe I need moar rage :-)
By the way, Jester must get some serious traffic, because he has been consistently at the top of the list for traffic at my site as well.
If only I had linked you maybe once more I could have put Riverini in his place!
Another month and I will be writing my own regular anniversary post. Need a theme…
Grats on five years! :D
Gratz on 5 years, I’ve been reading for at least 4 of those. What server are you rolling on Gw2? I need to find an active home server for WvW.
I’ll be posting GW2 info for INQ when we finally pick a server, no worries.
Gratz on 5 years Syn!
Grats on the 5 year-versary.
Brats and keep it up.